Critics not Caretakers

Russell McCutcheon's book Critics Not Caretakers is powerful defense of a secularist approach to doing Religious Studies. McCutcheon's agenda is without pretense, it is the attempt to clearly identify the discipline of Religious Studies with an series of methods which take a critical stance towards religion. McCutcheon, then, follows the work of J.Z. Smith and Burton Mack as well as others of similar inclination. The result of this is an new emphasis on a couple of pivotal terms that function to re-orient the discipline. The first of these is without doubt "explanation." The notion of explanation is one which is somewhat out of fashion in certain quarters of the academy. Such a notion bespeaks a reductionistic colonialism, "we" tell "them" what they are really doing. Yet while recognizing such a critique, McCutcheon does not shy away from invoking the notion of explanation anyway, "our goal should not be for experiences to overlap with those of the other, but rather, to explain from our admittedly entrenched point of view, what we perceive to be going on out there and, given our own theoretical interests, why it is going on."(82) The call to explanation then involves an understanding and acknowledgment of our own positionality and the concomitant power, privileged and implicit oppression that goes along with it. It requires what Pierre Bourdieu will term reflexsivity. Yet it does not mean that the territory of explanation is thereby surrendered. Rather explanation must be grounded in what McCutcheon labels as "clearly articulated and defensible theories of human culture and belief systems."(82)

These systems that McCutcheon refers to leads us to the next key term that populate McCutcheon's thinking in this work and that is "social formation." This term reached the religious studies academy through the work of Burton Mack. Mack has a particular interest in the idea of social formation as a way of understanding the development of Christianity. Yet the term did not originate with Mack either, but found its way from the Marxist tradition and the work of Althusser. In his essay on Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser invokes the idea of social formation as a key component of social reproduction and more importantly ideological reproduction of the economic system. As a Marxist Althusser is still interested in examining the reproduction of capitalism through the variety of means at the disposal of capitalism. The notion is somewhat static in Althusser. In Mack however the idea of social formation has a more dynamic and intellectual implication. When Mack speaks of social formation he is talking about the construction of intellectual and mythic structures over time that are produced by the needs of a community often in the face of a challenge from outsiders. Mack then puts the emphasis on the first word "social" whereas Althusser is more interested in the second word "formation."

Yet where Althusser and Mack come together is precisely the entirely earthly origin of such social formations. Both see the creation of social formations as a response to particular situations which have their origin in a set of social and economic pheneomna that occur in the life of the society in question. Mack tends less to focus on the economic base as the origin of the social formations yet both Mack and Althusser would agree that the point of the social formation is the advancement of social reproduction. The continuance of the community is dependent on these social formations.

For McCutcheon, then, social formation is also an important concept precisely because it mandates explanation. Regardless of which word the emphasis is put the examination and explanation of a social formation demands the use of methods from the social sciences (and increasingly the biological sciences). This is given in McCutcheon's now familiar call for "analysis" over "description."(22) (fn. I might also mention that this too reflects Althusser call for "a development of the theory which goes beyond the form of ‘description’. "[isa's p. #]). McCutcheon (once more following J.Z. Smith) calls this "redescription" which he ultimately glosses into a "social definition and social theory of religion" (24). Thus for McCutcheon the usefulness of the idea of social formation is precisely that it invites social explanation.

But as important for McCutcheon is the dynamic that social formation brings . While Althusser's use of social formation seems more static than McCutcheon's and Mack's, Althusser points to a central fact that McCutcheon also discovers, the contradiction at the core of social formations. For Althusser this is self evident as the purpose of social formation is the reproduction of a capitalist system which is founded upon the central contradiction of labor and capital. McCutcheon spins this in another way though with clear echoes of Althusser

Because the social values, truths and ideals [of a given social formation] are hardly universal, because as Durkheim noted, the 'mystery that appears to surround them is entirely superficial and fades upon closer scrutiny. . . , [when one pulls] aside the veil with which the mythological imagination covered them" (1995:431) There is an inherent contradiction embedded at the core of social formations.(32)

Thus though as always there is far more emphasis on the economic base in Althusser than in McCutcheon, still we see that for both thinkers there is a form obfuscation implicit in the social formation, the attempt to conceal the "man behind the curtain." For McCutcheon that man is not the economic base, but rather the universalization of localized values. Althusser would not disagree with this analysis and yet would claim McCutcheon remained in the superstructure and needed one more step to see what this is ultimately about.

Nevertheless the point that both McCutcheon and Althusser agree completely on is the process of method. Ideological State Apparatuses or Social Formations cannot be taken at face value. A process of mere description which merely replicates a social formation's own logic does not provide us any new analysis. The process of explanation must step outside the internal logic of the system and look for points of origin. These points of origin are human in origin and accessible to social scientific methods. But any such analysis has as its basic presupposition that the religious social formation did not fall from heaven or was established by miraculous or supernatural means but rather is one more example of the kinds of cultural/social groups and belief systems that humans form. In fact McCutcheon prefers "social formation" over "religious formation" precisely because it makes this point emphatic. (26)